{"id":615,"date":"2014-02-17T08:31:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-17T08:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/02\/more-on-servants.html"},"modified":"2014-02-17T08:31:00","modified_gmt":"2014-02-17T08:31:00","slug":"more-on-servants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/02\/more-on-servants.html","title":{"rendered":"More on servants"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

So I\u2019ve been reading about \u201cThe Great Black Migration\u201d (The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America by Nicholas Lemann), about which I\u2019ll write more in a later post, but only a few pages in I realized that I had to retract my prior statements that \u201cWe\u2019re not accustomed to servants in 21st century America. In fact, it\u2019s been a long time since anyone but the wealthy has had servants.<\/a>\u201d <\/p>\n

Well, strictly speaking, maybe what I said was literally accurate \u2014 21st century America is not 20th century, and \u201clong time\u201d is a vague enough statement. But nonetheless, Lemann describes black life in the Jim Crow South and says, \u201cthe pay [for domestic work] was so low that every respectable white family in the Delta \u2014 even schoolteachers\u2019 and mail carriers\u2019 families \u2014 had at least one full-time servant.\u201d <\/p>\n

Lemann similarly discusses the fact that the Jim Crow system was structured, in large part, to prevent blacks in the South from \u201cgetting ahead\u201d and to keep them trapped in sharecropper farming and domestic work. In that sense, they were the \u201cguest workers\u201d of the day, with the system designed so that, if a white landlord wanted to cheat them (and he says that only a quarter of landlords dealt fairly with the sharecropper tenants), the sharecropper had no recourse except to try again at another farm. <\/p>\n

And as far as domestic servants are concerned, there\u2019s a whole genre of literature\/film about the relationships between the white households and their black servants. The longtime columnist of the Chicago Tribune had a column in the Sunday paper<\/a> about \u201cRose\u201d \u2014 the family servant (she \u201ccooked, cleaned, and changed diapers\u201d) of her childhood, with whom the family maintained contact after they moved northward and loved like a member of the family. And there\u2019s The Help, which I admit I never saw, so have no idea how much black life is sugar-coated, and \u201cDriving Miss Daisy\u201d which I remember only vaguely. But there are similarly-many stories coming out of the disproportionate number of Slate and Atlantic writers living in nanny-heavy New York City, of beloved Dominican nannies \u2014 yet, \u201cbeloved\u201d does not mean \u201cequal.\u201d <\/p>\n

Bottom line \u2014 do those pro-immigration-expansion advocates who speak of needing more low-wage workers, more nannies and farmworkers, really want to recreate Jim Crow South, in which people were consigned (except for rare cases of skill, hard work, and good fortune) to farm work and domestic work?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I\u2019ve been reading about \u201cThe Great Black Migration\u201d (The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America by Nicholas Lemann), about which I\u2019ll write more in a later post, but only a few pages in I realized that I had to retract my prior statements that \u201cWe\u2019re not accustomed to servants […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nMore on servants<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So I've been reading about "The Great Black Migration" (The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America by Nicholas Lemann), about\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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